Getting Ready for the Black Friday Sale

The Marketing Department told me to have a Black Friday sale on the Mark Rushton Gallery for the next couple of weeks, and I complied.  I just sent the email...

The sale is an automatic 25% off prints, tote bags, and magnetic art.  I thought that was the best way to go.  If there are any orders, I don't have to fulfill them - the vendor I'm partnered with handles that.

I didn't include any original art in the Black Friday sale because I didn't want to overdo it.  This year's Black Friday sale is my first, and I consider it to be "practice". 

Still, cleaning up the Prints section of my Gallery was quite a chore and took most of Saturday to get done.  I had initially set up my print store about 6 months ago, but everything needed a little adjustment.  After all that was done, I had to craft and proof the email.

Every Sunday, I like to take a little bit of time to check my stats.  This week I changed the way I'm logging site visits and page views.  On the web site's backend, they have a "past month" default.  Well, I used to edit that back to the previous week, but that took extra time.  Now I'm logging the monthly default in Excel as a kind of "rolling average" for each week.

Instagram has gone nowhere for the past month despite me issuing posts and Reels often.  I think that parlor trick is over, but I noticed the throttling starting a couple months ago.  You notice those things when you track data... It's probably a combination of people moving on to the next shiny object that the internet overlords tell you to worship, and also Zuck and his gang of Harvard and Stanford MBAs throttling everybody in the hopes that they can implement "pay to play" on Instagram for suckers who didn't pay attention that he pulled this stunt a decade ago when he effectively ruined the FB timeline.  How much is META stock down YTD?  Oh yeah, 73%.

The other thing I do is that I don't watch "The News".  Sometimes I can't help it.  Maybe Ann has the World Series on, and the ads, while muted, are relentless for political contests.  When you think about it, having ads during sportsball games for political candidates is perfect.  What are "The Phillies" or "The Astros" anymore?  It's where the home stadium is, but it's rare if any of the players are actually from those cities.  And half the time the players are on the road.  It's the same thing with politicians.  A lot of the politicians don't even live in the areas they claim to represent, or haven't been there long.  They're just hanging around to collect those lobbyist dollars and get a free meal.  Or if there's a call the politician doesn't like, they run out of the dugout all animated, screaming, kicking dust, and throwing a tantrum for the cameras while the trained seal announcers tell us what to think.  The politicians have all the answers, but only if the umpires rule their way, or if the slow motion replay cameras are turned off.

Anyway, I've got a mile of numbers and a ton of stats...